Jeffcotism: The Foundation of 21st Century Thought (I)

Zechariah Jeffcott's destiny was determined at the age of five, when he heard his mother say to his father -- who had just said that it was universally agreed that the angles of a triangle added up to 180 degrees -- "Oh, that's because nowadays the geometry mob will vilify you if you dare to say they add up to anything else." 

"At that moment", Z. Jeffcott assures us "There flashed across my mind the great truth that behind every widely held opinion there is always a powerful elite systematically enforcing conformity and punishing dissent. The more widely believe something is, the more likely it is to be false."

That is how Jeffcotism became the foundation of 21st century thought. 

Over the next few days we are going to be looking at the fruits of his discovery. 

*

I ate a shepherd's pie last night. He was livid. 

      Thomas Cooper

On 23rd April (St George's Day) the Daily Mail published a recipe for spaghetti bolognaise. 

Nothing wrong with that. I quite like spaghetti bolognaise. 

But strangely, they published it as part of a political column, under the Jeffcotian headline: 

The woke mob can rant for all they're worth, but I'll keep adding Worcester sauce to my spag bol

Four years ago, an Italian chef, Antonio Carluccio, remarked that bolognaise sauce properly contained only meat, tomatoes, and wine: if it contained carrots and herbs, it's not bolognaise. He also thinks it should be served with tagliatelle rather than spaghetti. Three years ago, Nigella Lawson published a recipe for carbonara, which included cream as an ingredient. Some Italians on the Internet said that this wasn't how you made carbonara. Earlier this year, restaurant critic Jonathan Meades mentioned in a collection of old essays that he didn't think that authenticity mattered all that much: it was more important that the food tasted nice. So political writer Tom Uttley has decided it is his duty to publish a receipt for bolognaise sauce that includes Heinz tomato ketchup and Lee and Perins sauce. There comes a moment when everyone has to show the world which side they are on. 

Is there are valid point being made here? Yes, probably. 

Is it an interesting point? No, not particularly. 

Is the language in which Utley makes the point a fascinating and disturbing specimen of the ubiquity of Jeffcotism? Why else do you think I am writing about it?

Food criticism is indeed sometimes too proscriptive. Excellence is indeed more important than authenticity. A dish containing meat, vegetables, onions and spaghetti might very well be nice to eat, even though it is not a traditional Italian sauce. The pizza of New York is not the same as the pizza of Naples, but both are very nice to eat. When fish and chips is first mentioned in print -- somewhere in Dickens, I believe -- it is referred to as "Jewish style" fried fish and potatoes, but a hundred and fifty years later it is as English as, well, fish and chips.

False representation is a thing, and cultural appropriation is a thing. I probably ought not to advertise my shop as selling "authentic Italian cuisine" if I am not using Italian recipes and none of my staff have ever been near Italy. I certainly ought not to open a chain of restaurants festooned with Union Jacks and beefeaters claiming to be selling Authentic English Jerk Chicken. (And no, a diner full of green, yellow and black flags and pictures of Bob Marley selling "Authentic Jamaican Roast Beef And Yorkshire Pudding" would not be just as bad. That's not how it works.) But the only objection to a seaside landlady serving up mildly spiced mince with rice and (for some reason) sultanas is that it tastes disgusting. The fact that no-one on the Indian sub-continent would recognise it as curry is neither here nor there. 

I can see why chefs get annoyed when writers tell them how to cook. No artist likes a critic. "Why are you telling me how to paint?" they say "when you can't paint yourself?" 

Some consumers don't like critics either. "How dare you tell me that that is not a good painting?" they say,  "There is no such thing as a good painting, or a bad painting, there is only a painting which I like, and my opinion is just as good as yours. Why are you forcing me to read your column in the paper you have forced me to buy?" 

"When you have written a thousand page fantasy novel about wizards / run a busy Italian restaurant / sung Wotan at Covent Garden" they continue "Then you will be entitled to tell me that the book / pizza / singer was boring / burned / flat. But not before."

Those who can, do. Those who can't, write long learned articles in the Times about those who can.  

On the other hand, I recall a Thespian, possibly Sir Michael Hordon, saying that unlike some people in "the profession" he did read "the notices" because the critics went to the theatre every night ("poor bastards") and knew what they were talking about. To repeat myself: If I want to find a good middle-priced vegetarian restaurant; I would do better to ask Cecil, who eats out five nights a week but can't cook to save his life, than Joe, who hardly ever goes out but is widely regarded as the best pastry chef in the whole of Milton Keynes. I myself can point you in the direction of the best folk gigs in Bristol, even though I can't sing or play a single note. 

However, Tom Uttley turns this very obvious and uninteresting pushback against the preachy, proscriptive food critic  into a buzz-word bingo of Jeffcotian snarl words. 

"Before I write another word, I must issue a trigger warning to all culinary purists, vegans, opponents of cultural appropriation and others of a sensitive, woke disposition who are inclined to take offence at just about anything."

"Anyway, I can already sense the purists and politically correct leaping to condemn me for my sacrilegious treatment of goulash and bolognese." 

"The truth is that since the dawn of international trading, mankind has been culturally appropriating recipes, fashion tips, words, religions, artistic genres, scientific discoveries and economic and political systems from foreign societies. It’s only in this deranged modern world that fanatics have come to believe that adopting good ideas is a vile crime."

No-one has actually said anything is a vile crime, of course. It seems to me that a dish of minced beef, onion and gravy topped with mashed potato is pretty obviously not a "shepherds pie". If you wanted it to be a shepherds pie you would have made it with mutton. But no-one is claiming that being wrong on this point is or should be a criminal offence. 

At one time, most of the words in Uttley's Jeffcotian vocabulary had pretty clear meanings. A "trigger" meant something that could set off a PTSD episode, like a soldier having flashbacks to the trenches when he heard a motorbike backfire. "Political correctness" meant the avoidance of language which was demeaning to minorities. "Cultural appropriation" meant a more powerful or privileged group adopting the dress or religious symbols of a weaker or less privileged ons and presenting them as their own. 

People sometimes say neurotic" when they mean "worried" and "schizophrenic" when they mean "undecided". Jumping down the throat of every adolescent who says "that maths lesson triggered me" is about as helpful as pointing out that Frankenstien was not the name of the actual monster. But still: we are entitled to ask in what way might "using the correct ingredients of a meat dish" be analogous to "saying 'wheelchair user' rather than 'cripple'"? Why is Tom Uttley implying that "inventing you own version of a recipe" is somehow similar to "putting Jewish mystical symbols you don't understand on expensive designer jewellery"? 

Well, to be funny of course. But why would anyone find it funny? I am 90% certain that Boris Johnson doesn't really masturbate into the Union Jack. Well, 85%. But if I call him a "flagshagger", you reasonably infer that I think that he is patriotic in an exaggeratedly and slightly disgusting way, and that I think that performative nationalism is a bad and ridiculous thing. You could then write two hundred and fifty comments on my blog quoting facts and figures you have googled in order to establish that I am wrong to think that Boris Johnson is affectedly patriotic. What Uttley is doing is pretending (as a joke) that he thinks that the left are going to say that his recipe is a form of cultural appropriation. No-one has really said this, and no-one really thinks anyone is going to. But the joke wouldn't be funny if we didn't think that the left really do apply the word "cultural appropriation" to very trivial things: in fact, if we weren't assumed to agree that the whole idea of cultural appropriation is intrinsically ridiculous. 

I am fully on board with offensive jokes. The worse taste the better. One day I am going to write something in depth about Jimmy Carr. Jokes don't particularly have to align with my politics. I doubt if Ian Hislop put his cross in the same box that I did last Thursday. 

But jokes are not value neutral. Benny Hill really didn't approve of pedophilia. But the fact that he treated "dirty old men" as essentially funny figures tells us something about the prevailing attitude to sexuality in his day. The fact that we wouldn't make those jokes tells us something about ours. Carry On Camping and Jimmy Savile are part of one continuum. (So are John Barrowman and Noel Clark. Allegedly.) 

I see three possibilities. 

Perhaps Utley is consciously trying to defang these words: to render them unusable. When some very nasty Twitter thugs briefly attacked me for liking Jeremy Corbyn, having bad breath and wearing silly ties; one of their tactics was to claim that expressions like "I feel cross" was "triggering them" (because a: they were Jewish and b: one of their relatives had been killed with a crossbow.) They did not, of course, really believe that the word "cross" would cause a traumatic flashback. What they were doing was insinuating that that claim that the depiction of sexual assault in a literary work might cause a flashback in a rape-victim was just as silly as pretending to be triggered by the word "cross". 

So the tactic here is to imply that complaining about the ingredients of goulash would be just as silly as complaining about the use of the word "n*gg*r" or "sp*st*c". Since it would obviously be silly to accuse an English curry house of cultural appropriation, it is equally silly to complain about a white man who wears dreadlocks or a not-Jewish pop star who burbles on and on about the kabbala. Some entirely imaginary people might possibly claim that serving bolognaise with mixed herbs is cultural appropriation, therefore cultural appropriation does not exist. 

But perhaps he doesn't care what the words mean, or indeed, what any words mean. Political Correctness, Cultural Appropriation; Offence; Woke; Elite; Trigger; Modern; and Deranged are all simply synonyms for Bad Thing, or indeed, Double Plus Ungood. I contend that this article -- and indeed, every Daily Mail article -- makes a great deal more sense if you read it that way. 

The baddies can rant for all they're worth, but I'll keep adding Worcester sauce to my spag bol

Before I write another word, I must issue a warning to all baddies, nasty people, horrid people, and others of a silly, stupid disposition who are inclined to disagree with things that I like.

The hollowing out of political discourse is, in my view, double plus ungood; but it is very much what I would expect baddies and people I disagree with to be engaged in. The world is black and white; everything either gives you cancer or cures cancer. We can spot the bad opinions because they are believed in by bad people; we know which are the bad people because they have the bad views. If only we could deport, kill, or cancel the bad people then the world would become a good and happy place.

Words are not neutral. A different writer would have said that he fully expected the communists to object to his recipe; that he would carry on putting custard on his roast beef even though the papists would tell him not to; that he wasn't going to pay any attention to protestant heretics telling him how to cook. Different societies have different folk devils, which can be very uncomfortable if you are one of the folk devils that needs exorcising.

But there is a third, more alarming possibility. 

Perhaps Uttley honestly believes all this bullshit. 

Perhaps he expects his readers to believe it as well. Perhaps he honestly believes that everyone in the modern world (everyone apart from him) is literally mad. Perhaps he honestly believes that there is a more or less organised faction who want to tell him how to cook; and that adapting recipes is a serious act of political resistance. Perhaps he truly thinks that the statements "the slave trade was regrettable" and "you should cook Italian food the way Italians do" contain a similar quality called "political correctness" and that sinister forces will punish him for his dissent. 

 Perhaps he is a fully comitted Jeffcotian. 

There really is a Woke Mob, and it is coming for your spaghetti.

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I think that in retrospect, everybody could see that Tom Baker was just too good. He wasn’t necessarily the best actor to play the Doctor. He wasn’t the first to think he owned the role, or even to get himself and the character mixed up. But he was the most charismatic incumbent. His ad libbing made him a de-facto co-writer. The credited writers naturally played up to his sense of humour. They wrote Tom-lines, and the audience tuned in to see Tom in a way they never had to see Jon or Pat or Bill. The TARDIS became less and less a fictitious space craft; and more and more a stage set or a TV studio. When Tom was discovered learning oil painting or playing chess with K-9, it didn’t occur to us to ask why, or what he was doing before, or what he did the rest of the time. It would have been like asking what Geoffery and Bungle did in the Rainbow House when they weren't singing songs or reading stories or making finger paintings. We understood, from a very early age, that people like Tom Baker and Rolf Harris and Zippy didn’t exist when the camera wasn’t pointed at them. Tom’s bundle of mannerisms and surrealism and jokes and gestures and one liners held the series together as the narrative around it became less and less coherent; less and less relevant; until it all but ceased to exist. You could have dropped Jon Pertwee into Web of Fear or Wheel in Space, or Pat Troughton into Silurians or Curse of Peladon, and very little about the story would have changed. Horns of Nimon or Nightmare of Eden or Armageddon Factor couldn’t be imagined without Tom Baker at the center. “Story” had become nothing more than a series of corridors to run along, monsters to offer jelly babies to, villains to deliver hammy speeches to. And it was all wonderful because Tom was wonderful but once Tom wasn’t there being wonderful any more it all started to fall apart: not because Peter Davison was a poor actor, but because Peter Davison was only an actor, and he could only deliver the lines he was given, in the script that was written. Hartnell, Troughton, and Pertwee were leading men in mostly well crafted costume dramas and thrillers; Davison, Baker II and McCoy floundered around in a star vehicle without a star. (McCoy could, in fact, have saved the series. But he didn't.)

*

And that’s pretty much all I have to say about “The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe.” As a wise man once said: “Piece of shit. Walk away.”

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12: The Return

I: The Sun

have an aversion to combining sweet and savoury flavours and in particular an aversion to combining food from the sea with food from the land

before jesus came and put a stop to it the jews were not allowed to cook a lobster in its mothers milk which is proved by the reference to fish fingers and custard in doctor who roses are redd-ish violets are blu-eish

since babylonian times school children have been given milk puddings as a dessert which they have always hated what is the matter with mary jane shes perfectly well and she hasnt a pain what a shame mary jane had a pain at the party

shakespeare said that tinned fish represented sexuality fools are as like to husbands as pilchards are to herrings the husbands the bigger

if we trouble to learn the secret language of the school-yard we will easily discern that the semolina pilchard straddles the boundary between land and sea fish and cow first course and pudding male and female nice and nasty sensible and silly this is the same as the jungian archetype of the fool which i am almost sure is in the tarot deck somewhere

so when the semolina pilchard tries to ascend the phallic axis of the world we see that true wisdom can only be achieved through the path of stupidity the eiffle tower is in paris paris makes me think of the judgement of paris which is in greek mythology somewhere

also the penguins chant hindu mantras about the dancing child who taught arjun the bhagavad gita so the penguins represents the combination of south with east black with white chocolate with cream biscuit with little coloured bits of silver foil

expert textpert choking smoker don't you see the joker laughs at you

II: The Moon

Campbell begins Hero With a Thousand Faces with a spectacularly inane passage from Freud. When a child asks where the new baby came from, his parents will sometimes say "The stork brought her".  But this isn't, it seems, where babies really come from. "We are telling the truth in symbolic clothing" says Siggy "For we know what the large bird signifies. But the child does not know it."

This, for Freud, is a bit like religion. God doesn't exist, any more than the Stork exists, but babies certainly exist and they certainly come from somewhere. God, like the Stork, "stands for" some truth. But the symbols in practice "distort" and "conceal" whatever truths they once represented. In any case, it's a bad idea to lie to children: better to dispense with the Stork metaphor altogether and tell the little darlings about erections and ejaculation and spermatozoa as soon as they are old enough to ask.

Campbell obviously likes the idea that the story of Mr Stork disguises the facts of reproduction. The purpose of Hero With a Thousand Faces is to "uncover some of the truth disguised for us under the figures of religion and mythology" – to get past the Stork of mythology and reveal the messy truth that lies behind it. But he doesn't seem to think that stork-type stories are lies that it would have been better never to have told in the first place; lies which can be thrown away once we are ready for the truth. He rather thinks that we ought to reverently and respectfully study the Stork so that eventually the big secret will reveal itself to us.

But it won't. There is no possible way that any amount of study of the Stork could possibly tell us what really happens in the maternity ward even if we swallow the idea that the Bird represents Mummy's Belly and that dropping the baby down the chimney represents the newborn's passage through the vagina which I assume we don't. Everyone but Freud – including the very small child who originally asked where his sister came from – understands that "The stork brought you" isn't a symbol, or a lie, or a myth or even a euphemism, but a polite refusal to answer the question, a form of words which means "I'm not going to tell you yet", like when you asked Granny how old she was and she replied "As old as my tongue, and a little bit older than my teeth."

The Stork is, in fact, a social construct in which a group of people in a particular society at a particular time agree that the bird will represent childbirth. Watch the opening minutes of Dumbo; look at the behaviour of storks in real life; do an art history analysis of twee Christening cards; compare stork-stories in America with stork-stories in the African basin. You will never discover the Truth about how babies are made. Because it just isn't there.

Your Sunday School teacher probably told you that Jesus preached in parables to enable his audience to understand him. In fact, he specifically said that he preached in parables to prevent his audience from understanding him.

In Mr William Wordsworth's poem Anecdote for Fathers, the narrator repeatedly asks a child why he prefers his new house to his old one. The child, who doesn't know, eventually claims that he likes the new house because it has a weather-cock and the old one didn't. In Mr Jim Henson's television show Sesame Street a character named Big Bird tried to understand why the old storekeeper (who has, in fact, died) will never come back, and is told by one of the adult characters "It has to be this way because."

Weather cocks, storks, giant yellow budgies: clearly large birds always represent unanswerable questions.




continues
sorry

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Fish Custard [19]

Bob, what are you songs about?

Some of my songs are about four minutes, some are about five minutes, and some, believe it or not, are about eleven or twelve minutes.

I went for a walk.

I listened to my I-Pod.

I realized that Visions of Joanna is the best six minutes of anything ever recorded by anyone ever. In fact, I am pretty sure that the lyrics of Visions of Joanna contain everything there is to be known. 

I used to think that it was the opening bars of Parsifal, but now I'm pretty sure that it's Visions of Joanna.

And while I was walking and listening I saw what it was that I've been trying, and failing, to say about Doctor Who for the past three months.

Years ago, after Sylvester but before Paul, I read a fanzine article about growing up as a Doctor Who fan in the 1970s. Most of the people in DWAS still wrote about growing up as a Doctor Who fan in the 1960s. This one was written by someone my own age. The writer of the article told a lot of embarrassing stories against himself: about stealing another boys underwear during a swimming lesson because he desperately needed some Doctor Who knickers for his collection; about working the Doctor's dialogue into his own conversation. His fellow pupils thought he was a bit of a nerd, and he got the cane when he tried out a choice Tom Baker one-liner on the headmaster. I forget if there was a point to the article.

It would increase my confidence in the fundamental interconnectedness of all things if some forum contributor could step forward and say "I was that soldier" at this point.

This reminded me of a lad in my class in the top juniors (year six in decimal money) who was a serious Doctor Who fan long before I was, and by serious I mean "a fan of the books more than a fan of the series". He had a slightly posh accent and read real books about real science and was on Isaac Asimov when I was still on Blast Off at Woomera.

I remember being slightly perplexed that even after the One With The Spiders he continued religiously to watch Whodunnit on ITV and even wore a sort of frock coat arrangement to the end of term fancy dress party when everybody else was wearing scarves and hats that didn't fit. Whodunnit was a game show in which "celebrities" watched a dramatized murder-mystery, were allowed to interview the survivors "in character", and then had to guess who the murderer was. Hosting it was Jon Pertwee's job in between the Police Box and the Scarecrow. Watching ITV at all was pretty daring in those days.

But, of course, it made perfect sense. My friend wasn't a Doctor Who fan: he was a Third Doctor fan; a Jon Pertwee fan. He liked to spend hours pottering around with his chemistry set, just like Doctor Who liked to potter for endless hours in the TARDIS. To the extent that eleven-year-olds have mannerisms he patterned his mannerisms on Jon Pertwee's. Fortunately for him, the Third Doctor was rather polite and courteous and would never have said "You're a classic example of the inverse relationship between size of mouth and size of brain" to the headmaster.

Bob Dylan fans talk a lot of rubbish. There are 1960s interviews where people ask him what his songs mean, and he says, "Huh, hmm, I can't remember". The daftest are the Dylanologists who think there's a consistent code behind the lyrics, that the one-eye midget shouting the word "Now!" is the same character as the one-eyed undertaker who blew a futile horn, and if only Bob could be persuaded to declare unto them this parable they would thereby know all parables. I myself have been tempted to wonder if "Joanna" is "Marijuana". But anyone who thinks that a code-book, a cypher, a "turn to page 54 for solution" could elucidate see the primitive wall flowers freeze while the jelly-faced women all sneeze and the one with moustache says "Jeeze! I can't find my knees!" will never, ever know what this poem, or any poem means: because they don't understand what poetry is.

And that's what I've been trying to say about Doctor Who.

You remember when John Byrne was about twelve months into his run on the Fantastic Four, after he'd worked out what he was doing, but before he got too up himself – about the time he did an issue that was half Galactus and half Doctor Doom the F.F themselves weren't in? You'd been reading the Fantastic Four for years because it sort of reminded you of the Fantastic Four and suddenly, this new guy was writing it and drawing it and you weren't so much reading it as swimming in it?

That's what I've been trying to say about Doctor Who.

The Tenth Doctor was dramatic and moody and funny, particularly when he went off on one; and the Ninth Doctor was like a tough working man with the Doctor hidden inside him; and the Seventh Doctor was like a jester carrying the whole universe on his shoulders; and the Sixth Doctor was scary and nasty and mad and fascinating; and the Fifth Doctor was played by Peter Davison. And 

I liked watching all of them, even Sylvester.

And that's what's different. Since 1981 there have been a long succession of Doctors who I really, really liked to watch. Matt Smith is the first Doctor since Tom Baker who I have wanted to be.

Christopher Robin came down the forest to the bridge, feeling all sunny and careless, and just as if twice nineteen didn't matter a bit, as it didn't on such a happy afternoon, and he thought that if he stood on the bottom rail of the bridge, and leant over, and watched the river slipping slowly away beneath him, then he would suddenly know everything that there was to be known, and he would be able to tell Pooh, who wasn't quite sure about some of it.

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Fish Custard [18]

The real adventure in Moby Dick is the one that happens inside Ahab. The rest is a fishing trip. Salman Rushdie

So. I am watching The Big Bang.

And I realise: this is not "The Eleventh Doctor". This is "The Doctor". There have been other Doctors in the past. There will be other Doctors in the future. There will come a time when there weren't "three Doctors" or "five Doctors", but merely "Doctors". A time when Bill Hartnell and even Tom Baker will be forgotten and a series of pictures of every actor to have played the role will be as obscure and meaningless as a list of every artist to have drawn Superman.

This isn't Doctor Who. This is Doctor Who. This isn't Doctor Who. This is Doctor Who.

You know, in retrospect, the really big change that happened during this season? At the beginning of The Lodger, which I may have mentioned that I rather liked, it's mentioned that Craig has a spare room because his previous flatmate inherited a fortune from an uncle he didn't even know he had. "How convenient," says the Doctor. And at the very end, so off-hand and in passing that I missed it, the Doctor says "Must remember to go back and alter that will."

Always before, there have been stern warnings, or at the very least, payment of lip service to gobbledegook rules which say that the Doctor can't change established history. But now we have a Doctor who messes around with Time in a cavalier way. The show is about Time Travel in a way that it just never was before. Time of the Angels showed us a River Song who can step out of a space ship in the certain knowledge that one day, maybe a million years from now, the Doctor will hear of her predicament and come back and rescue her. In one sense, this is a very logical answer to the question: "What would the universe be like if it contained just one man with a Time Machine?" River's invulnerability is a logical consequence of taking Doctor Who literally: just as much as Mickey having excrement put through his letterbox by neighbours who think he's murdered Rose was a logical consequence of taking Doctor Who literally. But it's much more fun.

The audacious first scene of The Pandorica Opens kicks Doctor Who into the realms of Time Bandits. All of time and space is now just a playground across which "stuff" can happen. Time Travel is what Doctor Who is about: so why shouldn't it be happening in four or five time periods at once? Why shouldn't Van Gogh paint a message to the Doctor and know, for certain, that it will eventually come into his hands? Why shouldn't Winston Churchill have a phone which connects to 3,000 years in the future? (The idea that Churchill can just phone up the Doctor feels so right. Winston and the Queen and Mummy and Daddy and Father Christmas and Doctor Who are all in a grown ups club and you aren't a member.) But the Doctor's manipulation of Time in The Big Bang – popping from a point after he's been rescued to tell Rory how to rescue him – is pure Bill and Ted.

I loved Bill and Ted. "An amiable enough pair of cretins" Barry Norman called them. I could never take the Matrix seriously. I so wanted Neo to say "How's it hanging Morpheus dude?" I'd never seen a story in which Time Travel was used so irresponsibly. Of course it was okay to muck around with history so that a particular future that you happen to like comes into being. Of course, if you were confronted with a locked room and had a time machine, the sensible thing to do would be to tell yourself that at some point in the future you would come back in time and put the keys in a place where you would be bound to find them.

The Pandorica Opens ends on the most over-the-top cliffhanger in the history of Doctor Who. The Doctor is in an impregnable prison, the TARDIS has been destroyed, the universe is about to be destroyed. It is solved, almost literally, by the Doctor going back in time and bribing the architect to put in an escape hatch.

Waters of Mars was about the only story from the second half of the Russell T Davies regime that I had any time for. But I was disappointed that the very, very dark climax – where the Doctor realises that he is the only Time Lord in the universe and therefore free to do whatever he likes – was not followed through. I had suspected that this new, hubristic Doctor would become the much threatened Dark Doctor and that the season climax would involve his previous companions banding together to defeat him. I speculated that this Doctor-turned-evil might be the terrible thing hidden in the Pandorica.

But now we see that it was followed through. Up to now, the Doctor has always felt, at some level, bound by the Laws of Time. Now the Laws of Time no longer exist, he can do what he wants. But what he wants is to have fun: not an evil Doctor, but a happy, impish, joyful Doctor, a Doctor who, in the face of the total destruction of everything that ever existed or ever will exist and his own death...decides that fezzes are cool. This is what the Time Lord Triumphant looks like.

Davies' penchant for over-the-top season climaxes never sat very easily with me. If there is an essence of Doctor Who, which there plainly isn't, it's little small scale stories, half a dozen scientists on a space ship being picked off by two or three Cybermen. Horror of Fang Rock and Ark in Space are the archetypal (not necessarily the best) Doctor Who stories. Doctor Who can, indeed, do "epic", but epic Who has usually been a matter of width, not volume. Dalek Masterplan and Frontier In Space felt "big" because the Doctor trekked through lots and lots of different environments in the course of the adventure: not because a hundred billion million Zulus coming over the hill.

So, yes, it is sort of fun for there to be an armada of every Doctor Who baddie converging on Stonehenge and it is certainly sort of fun when they all surround the Doctor in the catacomb. But this kind of thing always feels to me like Disneyland or, worse, like Marvel Superheroes Secret Wars. Snow White lives next to Winnie-the-Pooh, not because we've imagined a fun fairy tale world in which they might peacefully co-exist, but because they are both Trade Marks of the Disney Corporation. I suppose it is possible to picture a Doctor Who universe such that Daleks, Cybermen and Sontarans might come together in an alliance. But one feels that what's really linking them together is simply that they are all "Doctor Who monsters".

But under all the noise, Moffat is actually writing very, very small. The real action in The Pandorica Opens episode 1 takes place in a series of catacombs under Stonehenge: about as old Who a setting as you could want – corridors for goodness sake. And a large chunk of the action consists of Amy being menaced not by an army of Cybermen, not by one Cybermen, but by the dismembered head of one Cyberman – a scene which plays on peoples fear of spiders and snakes and skulls and is as genuinely scary as anything I can remember in Who Old or New.

Be honest: you jumped when the mask snapped open to reveal the skull.

Charles Dickens said that people complained that Our Mutual Friend was spoiled because they guessed the true identity of Rokesmith too easily. He found this odd because he thought he had been going out of his way to make it obvious. I thought I was being terribly smart, stroking my beard and saying sagely "Ah. The most dangerous being in the universe, imprisoned in the Pandorica. Who could it be but the Doctor!" The first episode carried a punch that it arguably didn't earn because all the way through I was waiting for find out what was in the box – but the only reason I cared about what was in the box was because "what is in the box?" had been set up in advance as "something which is going to surprise you". But the twist is an absolute classic: yes, the Pandorica opens, yes, the thing in the box is the Doctor – you were meant to get that – but the box isn't opening to let him OUT, but to put him IN, you dunderhead.

Some people (for example, me) complained about the extensive use of "plot devices" in Old New Who. Some of those people haven't minded the equally shameless use of the "plot devices" in New New Who nearly as much.

There are two reasons for this.

1: We are so pleased that RTD is gone that we will forgive Moffat anything.

2: When lots of other fun stuff is happening, you can forgive the occasional, or, let's be honest, frequent, hand-wave. Yes, in the cold light of day the whole of Flesh and Stone was a sequence of arbitrary manoeuvres in which the baddy developed a new power and the hero developed a new circumstance which would counteract the new power. But the "running around getting captured and escaping" part was so clearly nothing more than a net in which to catch the relationship between the Doctor, Amy and River it really didn't matter.

3: Moffat does it so much much better than RTD.

That's three reasons.

The typical RTD plot device when something like this.

ASSISTANT: Oh my god! Cosmic bibbles!

DOCTOR: Nothing in the universe can destroy cosmic bibbles.

ASSISTANT: We are doomed.

DOCTOR: Unless...unless this Cosmic Bibble Repellent I happen to have in pocket repels cosmic Bibbles.

ASSISTANT Whew – that was close!

The typical SM plot device goes more like this

DOCTOR: Have you seen my Wibble? It tastes nice, but Cosmic Bibbles find it repulsive.

(Later...)

DOCTOR: Careful, mustn't drop my Wibble. That would really repel any Cosmic Bibbles who happened to be passing.

(Later...)

ASSISTANT: Oh my God! Cosmic Bibbles!

DOCTOR: We're doomed!

ASSISTANT: But didn't you mention three episodes ago that you had something called, I forget...

DOCTOR: Brilliant! We can use my Wibble. It repels Cosmic Bibbles, you know.

The notion of "rebooting the universe" is beyond ridiculous. However, we had already been told, over a number of weeks.

a: That mysterious cracks existed in every part of the universe simultaneously

b: That they were caused by the TARDIS exploding in every part of the universe simultaneously

c: That things that go into the Cracks cease to exist retrospectively

d: That light from the Pandorica brings things that have disappeared through the Crack back into existence.

Ergo – when the whole universe is destroyed, the Doctor collides the TARDIS (explodes everywhere at once) with the Pandorica (magic bringy things back light) and brings the whole universe back. I wouldn't go so far as to say "perfectly logical", but...

It really all depends on the audacity of the telling. The stuff which is going on in the foreground is such fun that we are disinclined to complain, or notice, lapses in logic. I don't think anyone actually expected Amy to be properly dead; but we did expect that the Doctor would have to do something incredibly clever to save her. So far as I can tell, the actual explanation is that she's only mostly dead, and that the inescapable prison which the Doctor has just escaped from also functions as a resurrection chamber.

Obviously.

But this isn't what we see. What we see is pretty much a classic bit of conjurer's misdirection. We know that the Doctor is in the box. We know that the Doctor has to get out of the box. We know that the box with the Doctor in it is in the museum. We know that a mysterious stranger is sending messages to Little Amelia telling her to go to the museum and open the box (with the Doctor in it.) Little Amelia goes to the museum and opens the box (with the Doctor in it). And out of the box (with the Doctor in it) steps...the adult, and supposedly dead, Amy.

Does it "make sense?" We're so delighted that we really don't care.

Or, at any rate, I don't. I think this is why New New Who elicits such a Marmite reaction. It is visceral. It talks to our gut. It speaks to people who feel what Moffat feels about dreams and stories and childhood; who agree with him that dreams and stories and childhood and fairy tales are all inextricably bound up with a crazy little thing called Doctor Who. Mr Lawrence Miles may be an arse, but his remark that Doctor Who is his native mythology may be the truest thing that anyone has ever said. [*]

Fantasy and fairy tales (and mythology and religion and poetry) very largely bypass the conscious, rational mind and address the emotions. That's why proper serious science fiction fans like them so little. Proper serious science fiction fans are logical and rational and love to build things with Mecanno. Ursula La Guin [**] as we know, talks about "the language of the night" as opposed to "the language of the day." Good stories, she thinks, are both descriptions of things that happened in the real world, and collections of symbols which only make sense according to dream logic. If you read the Lord of the Rings logically, then Gollum is an avaricious, greedy hobbit who's lived a long time because of a magic item. But if you read it by dream logic, then you can easily see that Frodo and Gollum are one character split into two figures. Or three if you count Sam. Some people can't, or won't understand that a story can be dream-like and conclude that the Lord of the Rings is morally simplistic. And Moby Dick is only a fishing story. Some people are revolted, actually revolted, by the whole idea of fantasy. Lewis says it's like a phobia. Le Guin thinks it's about repression. If fantasy tells the truth about the unconscious mind in dream language, then of course some people can't bear to read fantasy. Why would they want to delve into the soully unconsciousy things? Some people who were quite happy to agree to disagree with me about the Phantom Menace have got positively angry with me for liking New New Who.

But it's probably just a matter of taste, like putting sugar in coffee or spreading salty yeast extract on your crumpets. A while back, on RPG.net or somewhere, someone said that he liked almost every kind of booze but had never enjoyed whisky. Should he try a more expensive brand? Try it with ice, or without ice? With a mixer? Go to a tutored tasting? After all, everyone says that a good single malt is about the finest liquor money (and its often quite a lot of money) can buy.

"Maybe," said a sensible correspondent "You just don't like whisky."

At the very very beginning, this season functioned perfectly well according to daylight logic. It was merest coincidence that the Doctor arrived in Amy's garden when she was asking Santa to send her a helper. The Doctor is very definitely real: the vagaries of Time Travel mean he disappears for a few years. We see it from his point of view: Amy is a little girl one minute and grown woman the next. That must be what the world looks like it to him all the time. But we also see it from Amy's point of view: the Doctor is a man who turned up from nowhere and disappeared again. Her family THINK he was only ever an "imaginary friend". When he comes back, it's AS IF her imaginary friend became real.

But this isn't enough for Moffat. Oh, no, no, no, no. He can't just say "The Doctor is like an imaginary friend who came to life." He has to say "The Doctor actually is an imaginary friend who came to life." The whole season plays around with ideas about dreams and memories. Braceman the android can become a human being (and therefore not a Dalek controlled bomb) if he embraces and feels and holds onto his artificial memories. Amy must choose which of the Dream Lord's realities is real, which is to say, which one she wants to be real. And over and over and over we are told that things which fall through cracks in space cease to exist – retrospectively wiped from existence – but at some level carry on existing if people remember them.

It's popular for the more dippy kind of book about death and bereavement to assure you that death is a state of being where you "continue to exist in the memory of others." Well, yes. I have a real memory of my grandmother in my mind: it is subjective and real to me, but I can't pass the qualia of that memory on to you. The most I can do is describe her to you, in words: but what you'll then have is not a memory of my grandmother, but a memory of me describing my grandmother to you. So a "story" in the sense of a work of fiction is like the memory of a person who never lived, or an event which never happened. When the Doctor falls out of the universe he become, in Amy's world, exactly what he always has been in ours. We are all stories in the end.

I don't understand, according to the Language of the Day why the Doctor comes back into the universe simply because Amy's remembers him. But we've been told so frequently, through the series that there is a magical connection between remembering things and things returning from the Crack that it really, really, really doesn't matter. By this point, you are either in the poetical fairy tale dream logical world that Moffat has built, or you aren't. You are either laughing and crying at the same time when Amy recites "Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue" or you aren't. Maybe the universe couldn't bear to be without the Doctor.

The wind back through time is stunning: the kind of thing poor Russell was completely failing to do at the end of the End of Time. I did of course, spot that the Doctor in Flesh and Stone (the one who tells Amy that she must remember what he told her when she was a little girl) was wearing a jacket, even though that jacket had been pointedly left in the hands of a Weeing Angel. Or at any rate, I noticed it once it had been pointed out to me. But I assumed that it was a mere production error, one of those little lacunae that asexual bus-spotters read far too much into. When it turned out the jacketed Doctor was indeed, a Doctor from the future travelling backwards through time, my jaw literally dropped. But the real point of the "rewind" scene was Doctor's monologue to the sleeping child. The Doctor was little Amy's imaginary friend; Amy's imaginary friend has now created, or recreated, the universe; the person who created the universe is watching over Amy while she sleeps. If you absolutely insist on turning the Doctor into God, this is the way to do it.

Is this "fetishising" the Doctor? Yes and no. The Doctor created the universe, and died to save it, and watches over little children while they sleep; but this only works if they believe in him. But he's only a story, but that doesn't matter, because stories are important. It's not a subtle message. But it is, at least, a message. If the Doctor is now God, it's because the script has presented him to us as godlike: not simply because he has stolen some of Jesus' kudos by sticking his arms out in a cruciform pose.

Davies used the Doctor simply as an iconic figure. He was important because he was wearing an "I am important" badge. In Last of the Time Lords everyone worships him; in Next Doctor, everyone applauds him; in Planet of the Dead, everyone loves him; in Fear Her...No, let's not even talk about Fear Her. They love, worship and applaud him simply because he has the title of Doctor. Nothing in the episodes have earned that love.

Amy doesn't love the Doctor because he's got Jesus symbols attached to him, or because it's the appropriate thing to do to the star of the show, or even because he's saved the universe. She loves him because he's himself. Very old and very kind. Weird. Fun. Grumpy. And for the first time since the re-launch, that's why I'm watching the programme. Not because it has a label which says "this has a sort of connection with a programme you liked when you are a kid". Not because I would be an ungrateful fan if I didn't boost the ratings. Not because any Who – CD, American, comic book, cartoon – is better than no Who. I'm watching because the Doctor is old and kind and weird and fun and grumpy. I'm watching it because the programme is itself and would be even if there had never been a programme called Doctor Who ever before.

When you ask the wrong kind of fan to explain what Doctor Who is all about, they are apt to say "He's the reincarnation of the Other Time Lord. You see, after the Pythian curse, Rassilon created knitting machines which..." When you ask the wrong kind of American, he says "..A Time Lord has 13 lives, and the Master had already used all of his..." But when Moffat needs a line which sums up Doctor Who, he writes "A daft old man who stole a magic box." That, in a nutshell, is why Season 5 works at and Seasons 1 - 4 didn't. Because it's being produced by someone who, at a deep level, gets what Doctor Who is all about.

It's about time.

[*] "If you read, say, the work of Salman Rushdie... .there's a lot of material in there that comes from traditional Indian culture, there are lots of links to Indian mythology. Which doesn't mean he has to believe in gods with the heads of elephants, obviously. It's just part of his background, those are the symbols he grew up with. That's more or less the way I feel about Doctor Who. I've got a pretty low opinion of a lot of the original episodes, but it's still my home territory. "

[**] As proper and serious a science fiction writer as one could hope to meet, so don't pay any attention to anything I say.

to be concluded

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